Planets as small as your house. A review of Super Mario Galaxy

This article reviews the 2008 Wii game Super Mario Galaxy from a ‘literary,’ cultural, and aesthetic perspective. It will be argued that fictional spaces are able to afford experiences of intimacy and security, in literature as well as in video games. The game will be compared on this point with the children’s book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and similarities in spatial make-up will be shown. In the end, it will be stated that although the spatial structure is similar to the book, and innovative with regard to the history of spatial representations in video games, the emotional content of the book is substantially deeper than that of the video game.